The divine did not bleed the way mortals did.
There was no wound to press a hand against, no cloth to darken with proof of damage. When a deity lost something fundamental to their nature, it did not announce itself with pain, not at first. It announced itself with absence. A quiet hollowing, like the moment after a bell has rung and the air no longer remembers the sound.
Aera had known this, theoretically, before she did it.
She understood it differently now.
She stood at the edge of the eastern courtyard, the one nobody used since the old empress's garden had been left to overgrow. Vines had swallowed the stone benches. The fountain had long since gone dry, its basin filled instead with fallen leaves that had rotted into something dark and formless. It was ugly in the way abandoned things always were, not dramatically, not poetically. Just quietly, steadily ugly.
She liked it here for that reason.
No one came to perform grief in a garden that looked like this.
Aera pressed two fingers to the center of her sternum, just below the hollow of her throat. She did it without thinking, the way one's tongue finds a missing tooth. Searching for what was no longer there.
Three cores. That was what she had been born with, three points of divine light seated deep within her, each one a pillar holding up the architecture of what she was. Her perception. Her reach. Her continuity across time.
She had given one to him.
Not a fragment. Not a sliver carefully extracted. The whole thing, intact and burning, pressed into the curse like a key into a lock, because that was the only way it would hold. A fragment would have dissolved. A piece would have bought him days, maybe weeks. She had done the math the way a person calculates a fall before jumping, quickly and without looking too hard at the numbers.
One core. Gone.
What remained was not pain. What remained was a kind of, thinness. As though she had been a tapestry once, dense and layered, and someone had pulled threads from the back until the image on the front still held its shape but the light came through in places it hadn't before.
She could still see clearly. She could still move through the palace unseen, could still read the weight of a room the moment she entered it. Those things were intact. But there were moments, brief and disorienting, when time seemed to slip sideways. When she would look at a thing and not quite know if she was seeing it now or some echo of a moment already passed. When a person would speak to her and the words would arrive a breath too late, like sound traveling across water.
It was getting worse, not better.
She had expected that.
She pressed her fingers harder against her sternum as if pressure could compensate for absence. It could not. She released the breath she'd been holding and let her hand fall.
Across the courtyard, a bird landed on the rim of the dry fountain, looked around with the blank authority birds always had, and left.
Aera watched it go.
She had not told Taehyung. She would not tell Taehyung. That was not a decision she had agonized over, it was simply obvious, the way certain things were obvious once you had already chosen them. He carried enough. He carried the fire that was eating him alive, the court that had never once looked at him without calculation, the brother who smiled with all his teeth and meant none of it. He carried Mok-Jae's death now too, and however Taehyung processed that, quietly, violently, alone he was processing it.
She would not add her deterioration to that weight.
What she had given him was a gift. Gifts did not come with receipts. They did not come with the giver standing at the door asking to be thanked, asking to be worried over, asking to be held carefully because they were now fragile in ways they hadn't been before.
She was not fragile.
She was just less.
The word sat in her chest with a bluntness she didn't bother dressing up. Less. Not broken. Not ruined. Less. There was a difference and she held onto it with both hands because the alternative, the idea that she had diminished herself beyond recovery, was not something she was prepared to look at directly yet.
Two cores remaining.
One sustained her perception. One sustained her continuity, her ability to exist across time without fraying at the edges. Both still present. Both still functional. She had run the internal accounting so many times in the last weeks that it had become reflexive, a thing she did the way the sick press their fingers to their own pulse. Just checking. Just confirming.
Still here. Still here. Still here.
The courtyard had gone gold in the late afternoon light. Even the rot in the fountain basin looked almost deliberate in this hour, like someone had arranged it. Aera sat down on the stone floor, back against the crumbling wall, legs folded beneath her. The posture was undignified for something divine. She was aware of that and did not care.
She thought about Taehyung standing before Yul.
She had not been in the room. She hadn't needed to be. She had felt the shift in the palace's atmosphere the way a person feels pressure drop before rain, a tightening, a held breath, and then something releasing that was not quite relief and not quite tension but somewhere between the two. She had known, without seeing it, that Taehyung had not broken. Had not bent. Had stood in front of the crown prince with Mok-Jae's blood still barely dry on his recent memory and said, in whatever words or silence he had chosen: I am no longer beneath you.
Good.
She had given a core so that he could live long enough to do things like that. So that the fire eating him from the inside would slow, would stall, would give him more days and weeks and months to become whatever it was he was in the process of becoming. A prince who killed rebels with his own hands. A prince who looked his brother in the eye and did not look away first.
She wanted him to live to see what he became.
She intended to be there when he did.
Even if by then she was running on two cores instead of three, or one instead of two, she pushed that thought down before it finished forming. That was a problem for a future version of herself to solve. She was practical like that. She always had been. It was one of the few things about her divine nature that felt genuinely useful, this ability to separate what was happening now from what might happen later, to exist fully in the present catastrophe without being swallowed by the anticipated one.
Right now: two cores. Functional. Present.
Right now: Taehyung alive. Moving through the palace with the weight of a man who has killed and knows it and is still standing.
Right now: the eastern courtyard going gold and quiet around her, the dead fountain, the overgrown benches, the bird long gone.
That was enough.
She pressed her fingers to her sternum one more time, habit, reflex, the wordless checking-in, and felt the absence of the third core the way you feel a chair that used to be in a room after someone has taken it away.
The space where it had been was clean and exact and permanent.
She left her hand there a moment longer than necessary.
Then she folded it into her lap and watched the light change.